Текст книги "I, Ripper: A Novel"

Автор книги: Stephen Hunter

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The Diary

October 18, 1888 (cont’d)

I pulled my weapon. It was my cock.

“Here, then,” she said, “let Suzie put you to me and make you feel all good and warm, that’s what Suzie does, she does.”

Her hands upon me were indeed an angel’s. I felt each of them against my stout member. As she guided me into her, her fingers were gentle yet firm, kind yet serious, ideal yet sensual. I felt some wiggle as she found opening, acquired proper angle, pushed, pulled, guided, adjusted, corrected, bringing herself to me as much as me to her, and then she had me full in, set, and into her center I plunged. I felt it as satin on silk with some hint of lubricity, the surfaces meshing against a whisper of friction for the thrill of tightness, and we formed perfectly into a dynamo of smoothness, a sense of gliding, gliding, gliding until, in so far I felt I’d die, either she ran out of channel or I ran short on instrument.

“Oh, God,” she said, “oh, sir, how wonderful you feel inside of me.” Was this malarkey she gave all the boys? Who cared at that point, for my hips took up a natural rhythm and we began the dance, the ritual, the tribal ceremony. I felt her heart, her thin-boned chest against my heavier issue, the damned interference of our clothes, but soon, in the plunging and partial withdrawing to plunge again, there was a magic in her hips, and she found the primal rhythm, she was able to arrange her body and her hips as if on a sustaining armature, and it freed her hips to begin to move as if alone in space, propelled by a reptile brain unacknowledged by higher functions, and that is why it was so magical and that is why men and women in circumstances high and low, mortal or humane, decent or desperate, sell their souls in a trice for its exquisite anarchy.

I lost all sense of clothes at all, two bodies in a church, the church in the city, the city in the nation, the nation on the planet. With my hands I pressed her against me, believing I could feel her shudder, knowing I could feel her hips find and match my speed and urgency. I kissed her hard, and it was a tongue-tongue thing, all thrash and suck and slurp and mash, feeling our breath combine as it poured from engorged nostrils. There remained but the spasm, and it occurred when it should occur, too soon yet too late, which is to say perfection, as there seemed no point of postponement, to say nothing of the will. My release was cataclysmic. I have heard of of a chemical called dynamite that can explode anything, and it was as if I’d been packed with this wonder stuff. The details are banal in the telling, but not in the remembering, and not in the actual.

I pulled back, breathing hard, sucking for God’s oxygen to fill my depleted lungs and bring vigor to my exhausted limbs. I felt the great, satisfied emptiness. I saw her in candle flicker, skirts dropped again, smiling almost as if it had been more than a performance, shaking her head to release her fair hair from the tangles that the dampness of her sweat had ensnared it within. She dipped into her purse and pulled out some muffinlike piece with which to powder her face.

“There now,” she said, “feeling all better, are we?”

“Indeed, my Juliet. It is the east and you are the sun.”

“You talk fancy even after I’ve yanked me knickers! Now, there’s a gentleman.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Jeb’s Memoir

“Jack the Ripper is humanitarian,” he said.

“Good heavens, Professor. The man has ripped four women to shreds, pulled their guts out, and lived to laugh about it. How on earth could you apply that term to such bestiality?”

“Indeed, his work is total destruction. Consider it not as we find it, all messy and blood-spattered, with lakes of red about, but as it is experienced. He is, it must and should be noted, not torturing the women. He takes no thrill in their pain. He feels no pleasure in slow, screaming deaths. Quite the contrary, he is well practiced in the art of the immediate and silent kill. Part of this, to be sure, is pure efficiency. It is much easier on him, though a case could be made that chloroform and transfer of the sleeping body to a private nearby spot would clearly not be beyond his powers, and once there, he could amuse himself with torture games for hours and hours. He seems not remotely tempted by such a thing. I suppose another part of it is that selfsame military technique, for part of a raider’s skill must be in eliminating sentries before the attack or ambush. One slithers silently through the brush and fells the watcher from behind with a sure stroke. It must be well done or the watcher screams as he dies and alerts the campful of Pathan or Zulu about to go to the slaughter.

“While there’s all this, consider that of all ways to kill a human being, the sudden sundering of the carotid artery is among the kindest, assuming consciousness. A bullet to the brain might trump it, as would the immensity of an artillery detonation. Next comes Jack’s method, which would be experienced as a blur, an impact, a tingle, an instant fatigue and loss of balance, perhaps a fleeting awareness that the end is upon one, which would be somewhat occluded by the cloud of disbelief, and then the slip-sliding away of consciousness. It’s unlikely that much pain would accompany the journey.”

“Sir,” I said, somewhat arisen, “that hardly counts as humanitarianism.”

“By liberal pieties, no, which is one of the things I find so appalling about liberal pieties. You see it in terms of the discomfort it gives you in the contemplation, because you lack the imagination to see it in terms of the pain it spares her in the occurrence. Think on it, if you would, and put aside all those bromides and homilies that sustain the bourgeoisie in the face of reality, which I believe you are becoming aware of in your forced sojourns into Whitechapel.”

“I will hold it in abeyance until further evidence is produced, but my tendency is to discount it and prefer the first two explanations.”

“Well enough. I proceed, confident that I am soon to convince you.”

More pipe theater as he emptied, tamped, refilled, lit, inhaled, exhaled, enjoyed the mushroom of vapor that billowed before him, then turned.

“I await,” I said, pen poised above tablet.

“I deliver,” he said, smiling at his riposte. He found himself, it must be said, quite amusing. “Now turn to the incident at Goulston Street.”

“The baffling graffito, with J-E-W-S misspelled, on which you have already theorized.”

“Put aside that for an instant. Put aside the business of grammar. Turn to punctuation. What is missing, as the reports all agree?”

I thought a bit. I saw it in my mind’s eye.

“The Juwes are The men that Will not be Blamed for nothing”

Or was it “The Juwes are not The men that Will be Blamed for nothing,” as some had it?

“Hmm, missing? I suppose, other than sense, grammar, somewhat chaotic capitalization, I don’t see that anything—oh, yes, wait, well, that is being very persnickity.”

“I am a persnickity sort. I am a phoneticist.”

“Then one would say the concluding period. None of the three copyists recorded a period at its conclusion. However, that may be because of an error in transmission. The copyists—”

“All three forgot a period?”

“Hmm,” I said again. “All right, I take your point.”

“Do you? The larger point?”

“The larger point?”

“He was interrupted, who knows by what or whom. Possibly that copper coming down the street. But he realized that although he had really engineered the whole thing to pass on this message, he had the discipline—military, that is—to retreat upon threat of discovery and not drive himself on false pride and end up in the bag. He decided not to compromise the completion of the whole mission for this one component of it. Do you see?”

“So there’s more?”

“Indeed. What could the next few words be, considering what was going on in London then, his character as we have drawn it, his few but admittedly existent virtues, perhaps even, out of his military past, a sense of duty, moral duty. It must also fit on the wall, which limits the space. Limits it to just a few more words, another line at most.”

Was Dare mad? “I have no idea.”

“This,” he said. “ ‘The Juwes are The men that Will not blamed for nothing . . . was done by them.’ ”

I looked at him.

“WAS DONE BY THEM! It’s in the passive voice of so much military report writing, it restores the grammatical integrity of the educated man—Sandhurst, I’m guessing—to the composition, it is succinct, the space on the wall would permit it, and it could be written by the light of a quarter-moon by a fellow with sharp eyes. But its point is to absolve the Jews, because he could see that fear and hate was building, that beatings had taken place, that the newsrags, including yours—”

That damned Harry Dam again!

“—were fanning the flames to sell yet more papers, that the thugees and druids of the slums were building up energy. He saw all that and could not live with the idea of a thousand Jews dying in the flames of hatred because of his mission. So he took it upon himself to formally absolve them, signing his statement with Mrs. Eddowes’s blood and placing it on a police route where it could not be missed.”

I was not convinced, although the man’s argument had logic to it. “And if so, of what import? I see it leading us nowhere.”

“Quite the contrary, it leads us very much somewhere.” Dare smiled.

He was a cat toying with a mouse, and I, the great Jeb, did not care a bit to be made mouse of, to have all my arguments dashed upon the stones so insolently by a fellow who was not only smarter but could afford a better tailor and didn’t live with a horrid mum and a trilling sister.

“What somewhere, pray tell?”

“Where would he get such ideas? Clearly, he believes that the Jews—bogeymen of the popular press, demons of the working-class imagination, devils of the retail exchange, depraved and violent in folk rumor, despised by the capitalist class because they are so much better at capitalism, despised by the revolutionary class because they are so much better at revolution, detested for lacking fairness and physical beauty and portrayed everywhere as hook-nosed, yellow-skinned, shawl-wearing, matzoh-ball-eating vermin—he believes them to be human beings, like all of us. Where on God’s earth could he have gotten such an idea?”

“I see it,” I said.

“Then explain it.”

“Those ideas are hardly held anywhere in the world except in certain liberal reform circles, very small but very passionate. Not at all the place where one would find a soldier or intelligence agent of much battle experience. So your point has to be that he has been exposed, somehow, somewhere, sometime, to those ideas, but more important, to people who espouse them, for it is not the sort of inconvenient passion one would absorb merely from reading. You’d have to live it, feel it heavy in the air, indulge in it at length as an assumption, not an argument. And where would we find people of such ideas? I cannot see him gadding about among the better sort of intellectual circles in Bloomsbury, can you?”

“No, I do not see that.”

“Only one possibility remains. In the church. Possibly in family, given a rector as father or brother, possibly by marriage to a Quaker woman.”

“You have it, sir. Exactly.”

“A soldier—raider, rather—experienced in Afghanistan, highly evolved military skills, dyslexic, Sandhurst, yet the son of a pastor or minister of some sort.”

“Ecce Jack.”

I realized then: He had made his sale.

Against his campaign, my little foray into detectivism seemed trivial.

“All right,” I said, “it’s quite brilliant, so much further along than anything anyone else has said. You have a genius for this sort of analysis, I must admit. I am humbled. Why, it is as if you are Sherlock Holmes himself.”

“Who?”

“The detective Sherlock Holmes. The genius who can decode a crime scene brilliantly, sift through clues with ease, point out the plot, its purpose, and its perpetrator. In Conan Doyle’s book A Study in Scarlet.”

“Never heard of it. As I said, let’s just stop the gutting of the whores. Now I turn to you for practicality.”

“Perhaps I can at last contribute,” I said. For even as I had been listening and recording in Pitman, I had been, in a different part of my mind, seeking utility for these new ideas.

“I await patiently,” he said. “As you know, I am somewhat bereft of practicality. I am an expert on one thing alone, the voice.” So Holmesian!

“My thought,” I said, “is that I am, after all, a journalist. While the Star is not the best of all papers in London, even if it is one of the loudest, my connection to it secures me entry into the journalists’ society. On our paper or on another, there has to be a fellow who has made it his speciality to cover issues of war. He’s been to many, he knows the officers and the civilians who supervise them well, and most of all, he already has cultivated a network of private informants. He is well known at Cumberland House, army headquarters. My idea would be to locate this man and somehow entice him to our aid. We would start with the broadest categorization of what you have said. We are looking for someone recently retired from active duty, with connections to intelligence, who is privately known by those who are privy to such things, as a superb operative in mufti, particularly in Afghanistan, who has a gift for languages and a reputation for that which we will call ‘efficiency,’ it being understood that such a word connotes the willingness to kill if necessary. He has been, further, much exposed to the horrors of battle and mutilation as performed in that hellhole, perhaps his mind subtly addled by it.”

“Excellent,” said Professor Dare.

“If we can get a list of such, some being more closely matched to the criteria than others, we can our own selves identify them and continue to winnow, by which method we can determine if the other markers are present: the dyslexia, the religious childhood, the superb night vision, the physical aspect of slightness, perhaps even the possession of poor Annie’s rings, though that may be too much to be wished. In that way, we can ultimately identify the one man who matches the template with perfection. Police notification would follow, then arrest, and we bathe in glory. I do like the glory part.”

“Then you may have it all, sir.”

“I am no hog. I will share, I swear.”

“And we’d better hurry, Jeb. After all, the quarter-moon fast approaches, on October 28. Our soldier of night will soon pursue another mission.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The Diary

October 26, 1888

It would soon be time again, since the campaign had obligations that needed to be met. I went on search, being careful to use what I had learned: I needed crowds—of Johns, citizens, and Judys—into which to melt anonymously. I needed quick access to dark streets. I needed at least one and possibly two escape routes. I needed to be cognizant of the police constables and their patrolling. I had to negotiate all these factors brilliantly, weighing them and finding a perfect balance, and remain aware that the task was made infinitely more difficult because Warren had put so many more blue bottles on the street, thinking the dragnet, the sheer number of uniformed men, plus a nice reward, would do the trick.

He was an idiot. For one thing, it is true of military and of police intelligences and also of engineers—and Warren was all three—that they conspicuously prepare for that which has already happened as opposed to that which has not. In my amblings around Whitechapel, I saw that the coppers were flooding the areas where I had already struck. They thought I was such a slave to habit (and as stupid as they were) that I would do the same.

It took no genius to look at the map and determine that aside from Long Liz Stride’s encounter, which had been governed by special rules, all the others had been north of the Whitechapel/Aldgate axis. So that was where the genius Warren deployed most of his troops. You could not go for a stout, or an apple from a coster’s stall, along the Whitechapel High Street without bumping into a constable with his ding-dong lantern and his whistle on rope. There were so many, they had naught to observe but themselves!

Meanwhile, as one progressed toward the southeast, the coppers seemed to dissipate, to thin, the spaces between them wider and yet wider again, block by block. At first I thought it might be a trap and that in some cellar along Stepney Way or Clavell Street he might have secreted a hundred men, ready to leap out upon the whistle and begin the hunt along the byways of the district’s quadrant, oriented southeast by compass. But he hadn’t the wit. Was the man stupid? Maybe he was merely slow and would eventually comprehend his own folly, but he lacked the adaptability and agility that the modern police executive needed. And who should know better than I?

My plans thus moved my area of operation away from the well used, down toward the river. For Jack, the area was virgin.

However, it did seem slightly different in element. Yes, dollies plied their trade down this way, but the road inclined toward the port, where the great ships bearing their Oriental loot tied up, and so the milieu became not only seedier but more infused with the accoutrements of maritime enterprise. The smell of riverine damp, that is, a kind of swollen density of water suspended in the atmosphere, seemed to fall like a curtain on these twisty streets, and the gist of retail somewhat altered, now presenting sailor’s dives with names like the Mermaid or the Bosun, or South of Fiji or Pitcairn’s Paradise, and as well what had to be Chinese opium dens (the smell outside started one hallucinating!) and places where tattoos could be inked on arms, chests, or, as I saw on one fellow, faces. If one looked during daylight hours down certain streets, or alleys or walkways between the humble buildings, one could see the maze of spars, masts, and rigging, the gathered, roped sails and crow’s nests of these behemoth vessels, as they berthed in the Western Docks in Wapping, or even farther out, on that strange near-island of wet creeks, swampland, and riverettes called the Isle of Dog, which offered a meander to the great River Thames and bent it around its own promontory and presented its own endless dockage. It was called Canary Wharf, where the East India Company, that grand circus of larceny and exploitation by armed robbery, unloaded, and where all the spices and silks and fruits and rice and whatnot were removed to be sold to poor Johnny English at sixteen times their cost in rupees or yen, and Johnny considered himself bargaineering in the process. This was the great mountebank’s engine that sustained our tight, lovely little land and, other than the dank warrens of Whitechapel and its brethren, kept it all green and happy, its victim-citizens as dim and blissful as mudlarks.

I mention this because it also somewhat changed the nature of the crowds one encountered, again a part of the element. One no longer saw the predominance of the top hat or the derby but, instead, the strange plumage of all the many jack-tars, the endless types of sailor caps the crew jerries wore. They came from all nations under these vagabond coverings, and one saw rounder eyes, bluer eyes, squintier eyes, darker skin, lighter skin, bigger skulls, smaller skulls, hair of blond and black and red and even shaved—the Russkies, I’m guessing, who like to show their skull in contrast to flowing mustachios, meant to frighten, as they were all huskies to boot. Conversely, one saw fewer and fewer of the square, dull symmetrical faces of typical Englishmen. I fancied I could smell foreign spicings in the air, and even the costers offered fruit from different parts of the globe, some strangenesses that I could not identify as being from our very planet. I was quite convinced that I was no longer in England, for the babel of foreign voices.

One was aware that it was different down here and that the customary precautions might not be enough to provide security, and so made a pledge to self to make certain, then doubly certain, then certain a third time, before committing to action. The chaps about here would be burlier and more prone to violence of their own, so it was incumbent upon me not to incite a mob of mariners, as they might turn immediately to rough justice of the sort the Peelers and a stickler like Warren would abjure. I could end my days decorating a yardarm as it steered south by Java Head.

I chose at last and after much consideration a block that might have been in Wapping, in the way that Mitre Square turned out to be beyond Whitechapel, which would bring in a set of detectives from a division other than Whitechapel’s H. That would be fine and good, for the new boys would get all mixed in with the old, the communications would be worse, the cabals of influence more diffuse, Inspector Abberline’s control might be challenged and in all it would be a merry festival of more mucking up, Sir Charles Warren–style.

I chose a street one could exit either by heading in one of two directions or cutting through to a street just behind and parallel. My plan was to unite with a gal, nudge her down William for the necessary dark, finish her there, and make it the most famous thoroughfare in the Western world for a day or so, while making my usual coolly nonchalant exit back to civilization by morning. I realized the street names meant nothing, nor should they; all were alike, tiny streets of humble brick abodes linked in long ungainly strands, sporting a castellation of chimneys, poorly lit, of course, peopled with the invisible of London living and mostly dying without notice in the great city’s most obscure precincts. Wapping? Who had ever heard of such a place? No one on the Times or the Star or the Atheneum or at the British Museum. Ridiculous name, no, Wapping? Is that not what you do to an unruly child, give it a wapping until it shuts its mouth?

Everything was swell, that is, until it wasn’t.

I had thought finding a dolly would be the least of my problems, but right off, it became the most of them. It was late, it was dark, it was empty. I think in daytime, when I had scouted, the area was more frequented, but now there was nothing to be found. My first plan perished before it was even tested.

I knew bad things were more likely to happen when I had to improvise, as my lucky escape at Mitre Square proved, and every sensible part of my being argued for a retreat and another foray tomorrow, when the conditions would be more or less as good. But I’m like a rat aroused by the smell of blood sometimes, and against my own better judgment, I kept coursing ahead, thinking one more block closer to the docks, that’ll be the ticket, that’ll get me what I want.

At last I reached St. George, with hardly any of London left between me and the basin, wherein was moored a fleet of pirate vessels otherwise known as British shipping. I swore I could hear the stretched rope squealing and the stressed wood squeaking. Possibly it was pure imagination. I wandered up St. George, a wide street of extreme maritime atmosphere, and found it crowded in its way with the colorful specimens of the oceangoing brethren, hats and all, and I was aware that my more civilized garb made me stand out a bit, always a mistake in the mad-killer trade.

She was neither older nor younger than the other birds. She was neither prettier nor uglier. She was simply there, a figure out of a socialist painting that might be called The Eternal Streetwalker, puffing on a cigarette, resting against a gaslight, one hip provocatively cocked. I could see a bit more of neck and shoulder, as that seemed to be allowed down here. I also thought it was illegal for the girls to stand still, but this brazen Bessie betrayed no fear of the blue bottles. She was eyeing the trade and the trade was eyeing her, particularly her bosom, which men, perhaps out of collective maternal nostalgia, seemed to yearn to bury themselves within. Hers was vast and deep. Fortunately I am not so mentally constructed, so the bosom, present or vanished, is of little interest to me. She looked tough, and as I drew near, her eyes fixed on me and mine on hers, and in a few steps I was at her but not with her. That is, I stood close but conspicuously oriented away from her as crowds of drunks wobbled by, rocking as uncertainly as the big ships at berth a few dozen feet down the black alleys.

“Now, dearie, would you be looking for a spell of fun?” she eventually said.

“I might be, madame,” I said. “The mood is presently upon me.”

“Come on over so Evelyn can get a look, then.”

“That I will,” I said, and broke my pose, and made an elaborate charade of orbiting her station so she could inspect my goods.

“You don’t look like Saucy Jacky,” she said. “These days a gal has to be careful.”

“I thought Jack worked up the street a bit,” I said.

“Maybe he’s come slumming, like you. We don’t get many gentleman. This is mostly sailortown.”

“I would never characterize my efforts as ‘slumming,’ my dear. To me, all women are equally beautiful and equally desirable but, alas, not equally available.”

“I’m thinking this is a night for availability, then, not beauty nor desire,” she said. She was a game one!

“Well said, my dear. A mile that way, the tariff is thruppence. What would it be closer to Mother Thames?”

“Can’t give you no discount for your long walk,” she said. “Ain’t my bother the coppers is all over that street up there. We’ve got our pride in Wapping, too.”

“So a thruppence, then, and both are happy.”

“I daresay.”

“Proceed. I’ll follow upon.”

She launched herself from the lamppost, tossed the cigarette, and I saw why she had elected to go permanently at mooring: She had a limp, some mangled business at the hip that probably was something tragic out of a Russian novel that I didn’t care to hear of. She made her progress at less than spiffy pace, up one block, up another, and at long last, she turned between two brick buildings a short distance away, whereupon we came to another street, small and darkish, and continued. Just a few more feet and I could see the gently rocking hulls of two great vessels at mooring on the quay.

It fell to darkness, and except for the heaving and cracking of the ships at rest, I could hear nothing and see nothing. We were in a passageway between the walls of two great warehouses, on cobblestones far from the interest of the street traffic. It was perfect.

She turned, exactly as Polly had turned, exactly as Annie had, exactly as Liz had, exactly as Kate had, and in turning offered me her long bare throat, and as my right hand slid inside my coat and I felt the grip of my Sheffield, I could see the tendons, the muscles, the softness of the skin, and knew exactly where I would drive the edge for maximum carnage.

“Now, guv’nor,” she said, “I’ll take me coin, if you please.”

And at that point, someone hit me hard on the back of the head, and all the stars in heaven exploded behind my eyes.